Obama adviser says hurricane could hurt campaign

Published: Monday, Oct. 29, 2012 9:44 a.m. CDT

By Christi Parsons — Tribune Washington Bureau

(MCT) — WASHINGTON — A top campaign adviser to President Barack Obama said Sunday that Hurricane Sandy could hurt efforts to turn out voters and potentially have an adverse effect on his bid for reelection.

The Obama campaign wants “unfettered access to the polls,” adviser David Axelrod said on CNN, “because we believe that the more people come out, the better we’re going to do.”

But the 2008 Republican nominee said he thinks the storm could help Obama because it will showcase him in command of an emergency in the final days before the election.

The American people will look to the president as the commander in chief, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on CBS. Voters are likely to see him conducting himself “in fine fashion,” McCain said, and “that might help him a little bit.”

Republicans and Democrats both were unusually focused on the weather during political conversations Sunday, as the end-of-campaign surprise turns out to be not an attack or scandal but rather on the hurricane.

Republican Mitt Romney canceled events in Virginia over the weekend, with aides saying he did not want to distract state and local officials from their preparations for the storm’s landfall Monday or Tuesday.

Obama is canceled trips to to northern Virginia on Monday and Colorado Springs on Tuesday. Both areas are critical to the president’s strategy this final week of the campaign.

A key piece of the Obama plan is the operation the campaign has been building for two years to find sporadic voters, win them over to the president and turn them out at the polls during early voting and on election day.

Nowhere is this more critical than in Ohio, one of two spots where the president still plans to campaign Monday. The other state still on the schedule is Florida.

If the president has to cut his travel to the West and Midwest, he has fewer chances to fire up supporters and volunteers to turn out the pro-Obama vote.

Secondly, rain and high winds could keep Obama backers in the eastern battleground states away from the polls.

The bigger the turnout, the better it goes for the president, Axelrod said when asked about the storm’s potential effect.

“And so, to the extent that it makes it harder, that’s a source of concern,” he said.

Above all, a failure to perform well on the storm front, or to be perceived as shirking his duty, could be more harmful than a few missed opportunities to campaign with suburban women.